There’s a glut of vacant office space plus a shortage of inexpensive housing in downtown Minneapolis, and one team of urban planning and design experts has come up with a solution for both: ultra-compact rentals about the size of a cruise ship cabin at half the cost of a typical Twin Cities apartment.
The plan, presented Tuesday, is a how-to guide for transforming empty office buildings into dorm-style micro-apartments that offer residents private sleep and work spaces, but shared kitchens in a “co-living” arrangement that’s an updated variation of the once-common “single-room occupancy” (SRO) model.
“We’re adding a lower rung on the housing ladder,” said Alex Horowitz, project director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, who collaborated with Wes LeBlanc, strategy director and principal for national planning firm Gensler.
They focused on showing how building owners, investors, city planners and others in Minneapolis, Denver and Seattle can transform urban office buildings into vertical neighborhoods for service workers, retirees and other budget-conscious renters.
In Minneapolis, the report focused on showing how a theoretical 21-floor office building could be converted into a mixed-use building with 1,080 co-living units. The ground floor would have a lobby, management office and just shy of 13,000 square-feet of retail space. The second floor would have 10,000 square feet of office space, and the third would have shared amenities, including a fitness center. Beneath the building, there’s room for 343 cars and 250 bikes.
The residential floors, on levels four through 21, would have an identical layout with single-occupant sleeping rooms with 130 to 157 square feet of fully furnished space, including an oversized twin bed, desk and chair, nightstand, microwave and standard-depth, half-sized refrigerator, that wrap around the share living spaces (living room, kitchen and laundry) clustered toward the center of each floor. Each rental has its own private entrance, and each floor would require key-card elevator access.
At about half the size of today’s traditional studio apartment, which typically has a full kitchen and bathroom, they’d rent for about $750 on average, including all utilities, which is about half the cost of a typical rental in downtown Minneapolis.
The project comes at a time of intense interest in finding new uses for empty office buildings. The pandemic drove up the prevalence of remote work, and in all three cities there’s a growing mismatch between the housing developers are building and the housing people need.
